Kate Elliott - Cold Magic

Bee nudged me. The foreman had seen us.

We retreated, and thence up again on the deserted stairs to the top floor. Just beyond the landing we discovered a blind corner, a stub end of the stairs on which we could sit in darkness,

lor there were no windows in the stairwell, and chafe our hands against the cold as the mill roared beside us. The vibration ground into our bones. Beyond all that, I could still feel and hear the other two mills besides, a clashing, dinning storm so relentless that it enveloped you like a blizzard. We breathed lint and tasted cinders, and Bee cradled her cheeks on her palms with her fingers covering her ears as if that could banish the tumult. Nothing could, just as nothing could banish the tumult of my thoughts.

How foolish to believe sunset would free us. Four Moons House might have no contractual power over Bee once she made twenty, but they could easily squash her vain attempts to maintain her independence by using their influence, wealth, and magic to force her into a cage, or even a new contract, of their choosing. What independence had we, really? Without money of our own and without influential patrons, we might soon find ourselves scrabbling for work in the brutal factories or standing in our rags at the door of a mage House or prince's dun begging to be taken on as a client, our lives and labor forfeit, in exchange for their protection. Had we sacrificed Rory for nothing? Was the outcome already determined?

I did not hear or see Bee's tears; I smelled them and I felt them, and so I threw an arm over her shoulders. For hours we hid, concealed by the busy turbulence of the mill that, like a huge beast, lived oblivious to our insignificant existence, two tiny sparks amid its oceanic vastness. We dared not speak, lest we be discovered, and we could not speak, because we could not hear each other. Cold, hungry, thirsty, tired, and exhausted, we sat in a shivering stupor. There was nothing we could do but survive this day.

And then I felt a change in the humming pulse, a tremor in the air, a shift in the harmonics of the conjoined hum of the three mills.

I grabbed Bee's arm, my hand tightening. She gulped down her tears and straightened. I did not think she could hear what I could hear. Not above Matarno Mill's tumult.

The music and beat of distant Toombs Mill was faltering, and the counter-rhythm it played into the whole stuttered and failed as the entire mill went silent. Dead.

I stood and pulled Bee up behind me, hit the stairs running, down and down, and we hit the great double doors, slammed right into them, but they were locked and chained from the outside. I hammered at them with my fists until Bee yanked me away.

"What is it?" she shouted. "What is-?"

Calders Mill began to die. With my head pressed to the doors, I heard the change fall in the same way one sees light shift before a storm, lowering, darkening. Silence can herald peace, or it can herald death.

The hooves of many horses beat a pattern on the dull earth; their noise drummed up through my feet and into my heart. Folk were shouting, yet at such a remove I could not hear their words; I could only feel the tide of the mansa's power approaching us like a katabatic wind blasting down off the ice.

There had to be another way out of the mill.

We started back up the stairs. The lamps flickered and went out. In icy darkness we climbed, saying nothing, for there was nothing to say. We needed our breath to run.

Below, the lock on the outside doors shattered with a splintering explosion, and the machines on the ground floor shuddered, and sputtered, and lugged to a halt. We burst through the doors into the spinning hall, with its machines set transversely to the windows to make the most of the light. Oddly, as we ran for the door on the far side, jumping over runners, stared at by the workers, shouted at by the foreman, I was reminded of the tables in the academy's library, set transverse to the tall windows. There, for the first time, I had seen Andevai, although I had not known who he was or that our paths would collide so fatefully.

Bee reached the door before me and yanked hard on the lock fixed to the latch. The thrumming that pervaded the structure began to thin and fade as the mansa mounted the steps behind us. Somehow, a hairpin had remained stuck in Bee's curls. Without a glance behind her-for who needed to look when we could feel the machines shudder and die at his approach? — she pulled the hairpin from her hair and set it into the lock mechanism, her expression fixed with concentration and her eyes closed.

As the machines fell silent and the wheels ceased, children crept under the threads to hide, and women and men turned to stare at the opposite door. Whip raised, the foreman advanced on that other door, ignoring us. He halted dead as a man stepped over the threshold and into the hall.

The mansa had come.

His was a presence one could never forget after meeting him: tall, imposing, and utterly commanding. A woman dropped to her knees, sobbing. His gaze, across the length of the hall, caught me. Pinned me.

"Got it!" said Bee triumphantly.

With a snick, the lock opened. She flung open the door. We bolted, and I slammed the door shut behind us, then leaped down three steps at a time after her, down into a black pit, for the lamps had all gone out.

On the stairwell's ground floor, we had a choice of three doors. I yanked at the doors leading outside, but they, too, were locked and chained. We could go back through the ground-floor hall of the mill, where we knew his soldiers had entered, or out through the weaving shed that was attached as an annex to the main building. In the weaving shed, looms still clattered, the floor humming beneath our feet as the machinery vibrated in full spate.

The door, unlocked, opened easily and we plunged over the threshold into a long, wide building whose timber roof was inset with windows. People bent over their work, oblivious to our entrance, unaware of the changed tenor of the mill, subservient to the deafening roar whose rhythms fell like a dance around us. Bee's mouth moved, but I could not hear her. Far, far away, down the length of the shed, stood a double door, our last hope for escape.

The machines closest to the stairwell shuddered and coughed, missing their beats. The engine in its adjoining house thudded and hissed and whined as the magister's descent down the stairs killed the fiery heart of its combustion. The laborers did begin to look up then. A woman wiped strands of hair from a sweaty forehead. A man stood poised with shuttle in hand, looking confounded and bewildered. We ran the length of the weaving shed-a good, long way-as the looms one by one fell silent behind us like voices smothered.

We ran, but it was already too late.

The far door opened and armed men wearing the fine jackets and bearing the bows and spears of mage House troops walked through. They halted, blocking our escape. Midway, we stopped and surveyed the walls of the structure. The windows were too high to reach. I turned, and Bee turned beside me, as the mansa and his attendants swept into the weaving shed. The last looms thunked and shushed in a kind of choking clut-clut-clut as they wheezed out their death rattle.

We had nowhere else to run. Even if I might hope to conceal myself and sneak past them, I could not conceal Bee. And I would not abandon her. Never.

"Bee," I said in a low voice, "if you grab a spanner and climb up on one of the looms, maybe you can reach and break one of the windows and climb while I rush him."

"Cat, I can't reach."

"But he'll kill me and force you to marry Andevai. Or himself!"

"He can try," she said ominously.

"He has the right. It's in the contract."

"I'm beginning to wonder what that troll would say about the legality of that contract, if it was forced on the family when they were under duress. As I'm sure it must have been."